By Thomas E. RicksThomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military from 1991 to 2008 for the Wall Street Journal and then the Washington Post. He can be reached at ricksblogcomment@gmail.com.

July 14, 2016

Best Defense is in summer reruns. Here is an item that originally ran on October 30, 2015.

I wrote about this several years ago, but I’ve had a couple of requests to lay out my morning information routine. In other words, this is how I get up to speed before sending in my daily blog file to the powers at Foreign Policy.

As before, I begin with my e-mail. I use three accounts, and usually overnight about 50 new e-mails have accumulated. This is way down from when I was covering the military for the Washington Post, when I often had 150 to 200 overnight messages. This used to take me an hour or two. Now it takes 15 minutes.

The biggest difference from several years ago is Twitter. I was reluctant to dive into social media, because I dislike the intrusive nature of the corporations that run and profit from it. But once in, I found it kind of addictive, I think because it is a faster way than searching the web for what’s up in the world of things I care about. I get to see what 951 people I’ve selected think I should know. Their retweets of others is especially helpful — it is like getting 951 smart filters on the world, passing on from their own contacts. (I find Facebook far less useful for work, but better for learning about what is happening in the part of Maine I live in. I think Facebook poses a major threat to hyperlocal newspapers.) I probably spend 45 minutes on Twitter every morning.

Finally, I turn to the internet. I still crunch about 30 sites every morning, but do it far faster than I once did, because tweets already have plucked for me much of what I want to read. This once took 90 minutes to two hours or more. Now it takes about one hour. The list changes about once a month or so. Here are the current sites in my morning workout, in the order I read them, with links provided where not obvious: